Loyalty Insights
Who should run your Net Promoter SystemSM?
By Rob Markey
Rob Markey is a partner and director with the Bain & Company New York office
and leads the firm’s Global Customer Strategy & Marketing practice. He is
coauthor of the best seller The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies
Thrive in a Customer-Driven World.
Copyright © 2015 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Who should run your Net Promoter SystemSM?
Omar Hashem, chief customer officer at Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank (NCB), has a young daughter
who’s a fan of Disney movies. So he took her to see Finding Nemo. Later, back at work, Hashem found that one
scene from the movie kept running through his mind. Nemo’s father, Marlin, accompanied by the blue tang named
Dory, must swim down into deep, dark water in search of a missing diver’s mask. Marlin is fearful, but Dory sings
to him: “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming….”
It felt to Hashem like the perfect metaphor for his job. NCB is one of the oldest banks in Saudi Arabia and the
largest in the Middle East. With more than 300 branches, it is well established and well known. But the banking
market in the region is becoming increasingly competitive, and about half the Saudi population is under the age
of 25. Young adults looking for a bank no longer choose whatever institution their fathers patronized. They expect
state-of-the-art service from their bank, and they let their friends on social media know when they don’t receive it.
NCB’s service levels, CEO Saeed Al-Ghamdi believed, were not where they needed to be. He felt that NCB could
and should be a leader.
The CEO asked Hashem to take on the job of chief customer officer, responsible for improving the bank’s service.
Soon Hashem and his team were implementing a Net Promoter System, piloting it in the bank’s credit card division.
They tracked scores and customer complaints. They began to make operational changes in their products and
services. Before long they were rolling the system out to other units.
While they eventually made great progress, the early going was anything but smooth. “There was a fight against
the process,” recalls Hashem. “There was a fight against the reason for [creating the process]. There was a fight
against the tool we used to measure the customer experience—and why this tool vs. another tool.” Hashem realized
he was intruding on other executives’ territories. He also realized that he had become just one more source of
annoyance to some of them, like an auditor. That was when he remembered Marlin and Dory. “I just had to keep
telling myself…you just have to keep swimming. It was roughly a year to get through this resistance.”
In my experience, Hashem’s leadership journey is quite
typical. The Net Promoter System involves creating new
processes for gathering feedback and acting on it. It
generates a new metric, the Net Promoter ScoreSM, along
with flurries of customer comments and complaints.
It requires managers and supervisors to close the loop
with people who give them feedback, to meet regularly
with frontline employees to discuss how to improve the
customer experience, and to pursue policy and process
changes elsewhere in the organization that impinge on
that experience. Little wonder that chief customer officers
like Hashem get pushback from their peers. The last
thing many executives want is yet another initiative or
program to worry about, particularly one that seems to
change so many traditional ways of working.
can lead an effective charge and build support for the
system over time. These chief customer officers—or
customer advocacy officers (CAOs), as my colleagues
and I like to call them—can overcome the inevitable
resistance, inspire the troops and generally get things
moving in the right direction. Without them, the system
would often be stillborn.
And yet the Net Promoter System has been implemented
successfully at many large companies, NCB among them.
One key to this accomplishment lies precisely with
people like Hashem—seasoned, savvy executives who
Requirement #1: Muddy boots. The most effective CAOs
have spent time in the trenches. They’re veterans, well
respected by leaders throughout the organization. They’re
savvy about how the organization works and how to
We’ve previously laid out the role of CAOs and the
organizations they lead. But what individual qualities
make for a successful CAO? What experiences? Not just
anyone will do, regardless of how bright and ambitious
he or she may seem to be. There are at least five requirements (see the infographic, “Five characteristics of an
effective chief advocacy officer”).
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Who should run your Net Promoter SystemSM?
get things done—even very difficult things. Rarely
are they new to the company, even if they have held
positions in customer experience elsewhere. Hashem,
for example, joined NCB a dozen years before becoming
chief customer officer. He had helped develop the bank’s
online presence, set up a cash-management function
and created a remittance business to attract the many
expatriates working in Saudi Arabia. Had he been a
newbie, he would probably have heard some version of,
“That’s not the way we do things around here,” over
and over. He might have chosen the wrong battles to
fight or the wrong people to fight with. Hashem knew
how things were done around NCB well before he
became CAO.
Many companies have come close to
the ideal, often because they are looking in unlikely places. Successful CAOs
come from a wide range of backgrounds,
some of them surprising.
Requirement #4: Beggar, borrower, thief. Rarely does
a company provide a fledgling Net Promoter System
with all the resources it will need. CAOs have to recruit
a team, sometimes poaching its members from other
functions. Until they can get their full team staffed up,
they have to make do with borrowed resources. They
need support from IT, but they may not have budget
to pay for it. They generally have more accountability
than they have authority. If life hands you a lemon, as
the saying goes, make lemonade. CAOs are skilled
lemonade makers.
Requirement #2: Street cred. Personal credibility is
something more than time spent in an organization.
People who are credible have earned the trust of their
peers. They understand how difficult people’s jobs can
be. They have a deep respect for customers and for the
employees who serve them. Their credibility with others
in the organization helps them build consensus around
the objective of building customer loyalty and its link to
the business’s strategy. When they say, “This is the way
to go,” other people listen. Conny Kalcher, vice president
of The LEGO 1 Group, was a natural choice to head
up her company’s Net Promoter System. A long-time
company veteran who had played many different roles,
Kalcher had earned the trust and respect of the LEGO
Group’s leadership team. She not only understood the
culture and heritage of the company, but she also had
a well-honed understanding of how to get things done.
So when customers raised an issue, Kalcher knew how to
pull together a team to get it resolved quickly and effectively.
Requirement #5: True grit. The Net Promoter System at
eBay sailed into heavy weather a few years after it was
launched. The company was operating without a continuous, proactive quality management layer in the system,
and, as a result, some of the data from the data warehouse was transposed and interpreted incorrectly. These
issues led to a high-profile mobilization around an
apparent issue that turned out to be an artifact rather than
a true problem. No matter: CAO Joshua Rossman put his
head down, rallied his team, and dedicated six months to
building quality enhancements to the program and bulletproofing the data quality. Thanks to that effort, EBay’s
Net Promoter System came out the other side much
stronger. CAOs have to be ready to take on tough battles,
even when doing so means putting their careers on the line.
Requirement #3: The heart of a customer. Even though
they’re almost always veterans of the organization, great
CAOs have a rare ability: They see the company through
the eyes of the customer rather than through the lens
of a function or business unit. They feel in their bones
what customers experience, and they care about it. Some
seem to have an innate ability to convey this level of
caring to frontline employees. When Richard Watts was
heading up the Net Promoter System implementation
at Progressive Insurance, he heard one executive complain
that his own mother’s policy had been canceled because
of bureaucratic rules. Right away Watts turned the slogan
“Is that any way to treat your mum?” into a mantra that
everyone in the company could understand and relate
to: Act as if the customer is your mother.
Searching for an individual who has all these traits is like
looking for a unicorn: You’re unlikely to find one. Few
people in this world have the combination of experience,
credibility, passion, resourcefulness and determination
required to succeed as a catalyst for fundamental culture
change. Yet many companies have come close to the
ideal, often because they are looking in unlikely places.
One company made a former CFO into its CAO. Another
found the right person running a call center. Still another
tapped a product manager. Successful CAOs come from
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Who should run your Net Promoter SystemSM?
Five characteristics of an effective
Customer Advocacy Officer
Street cred
Has the trust and respect
of their peers
Muddy boots
Has spent time in the
trenches and knows how
to get things done
Beggar, borrower, thief
Can operate with slim resources,
will poach as needed
The heart of a customer
Sees the company through
the customer’s eyes
True grit
Will put their career on the line
to win the important battles
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Who should run your Net Promoter SystemSM?
Three myths about who would make the best Chief Advocacy Officer
Who should you tap as CAO? Where should you look? The best CAOs aren’t always the people you
might think of first, and they aren’t always working in predictable roles. In fact, there are three sorts
of individuals you probably do not want—even though they might seem like logical candidates for
the job.
•
A candidate from a legendary customer-centric company. It’s only natural to imagine that veterans
of Disney, Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom or other customer-service legends would be the best prospects.
They would bring deep experience with their employer’s service-focused culture. They would
understand what’s most critical to success. Indeed, these are the folks your new CAO will want
to seek out for thoughts on best practices. But as transplants, such individuals rarely work out,
however talented they may be. For one thing, many of them are from companies where the
customer-centric culture is already deeply engrained. They never had to create a customer-centric
culture from scratch—and that will be their job now. And by definition they don’t have the
organizational knowledge or experience with your company that is essential to success. As newbies,
they’ll inevitably start off at a big disadvantage.
•
A candidate who has run a Net Promoter System before. Veteran CAOs do have some advantages.
They have led customer-centric transformations. They have fought the battles, and they know how
to create the processes that the system requires. Their challenge, again, is that they don’t know
how your organization works. They’re likely to bring a set of assumptions and preconceptions
about how to get things done that just doesn’t fit your company’s style or culture. So what you
gain in experience may not compensate for what you lose in effectiveness.
•
A customer-service expert from your own company. It’s always tempting to pick someone from the
customer-service ranks, such as the person in charge of your call center. Sometimes that can work.
More often, however, such candidates are deeply steeped in the way your company already
does things. They have been successful in that environment, and they may not see much reason
to change the status quo. You’re better off finding someone who knows how to get things done
in your organization but has no vested interest in the way you are serving and communicating
with customers today.
So cast a wide net, and don’t shrink from seeking out dark-horse candidates—particularly the ones
who score high on the five traits this article outlines.
a wide range of backgrounds, some of them surprising.
What makes the CAOs successful isn’t their previous
experience running Net Promoter Systems, because
most don’t have any (see the sidebar, “Three myths
about who would make the best CAO”). It’s that they
rate high on the five characteristics listed here.
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Of course they probably won’t find the job easy even
if they are superstars on every trait. Like Dory and
Marlin, like Hashem and all the other winning CAOs
we have met, what they really need is the ability to keep
on swimming.
LEGO® and the LEGO Group are trademarks belonging to the LEGO Group and used here with special permission.
Net Promoter® and NPS® are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.
Net Promoter SystemSM and Net Promoter ScoreSM are trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.
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